


The wedding

by imsfire



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Admiral Ackbar is licensed to marry troops under his command, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Draven is not a dick, F/M, Fluff and Feels, Luke and Chewie also get a mention, RebelCaptain May the Fourth Exchange, Romantic Fluff, Wedding Story, and SMUT, happiness, happy star wars day 2017, invented Festian wedding customs, minor han/leia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-10-28 00:16:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10819728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: Standing at the front of the small chamber of ceremonies, waiting and waiting like this, is weirdly terrifying.  He’s been in so many situations where torture or even death were imminent, and it shocks him to realise this feels worse.  It should be the happiest moment of his life but he has never been so nervous.Jyn and Cassian's wedding day, and their wedding night.





	The wedding

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hanorganaas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hanorganaas/gifts).



> The prompt was "Jyn and Cassian's wedding night" and I got a bit carried away and wrote the whole shebang.  
> I am inventing planets and wedding customs wildly; apologies to anyone who doesn't like my flights of fancy!  
> This story works as a follow up to the "Family Holiday" series; "Conversations with the best man" would also fit in, between sections 1 and 2!

“On Perralt they drink salt water at a wedding,” Bodhi says.  Cassian looks up from his data pad and wrinkles his brow in distaste.

“Drinking salt water causes insanity and hallucinations in humans.”  K-2 sounds intrigued. “Perhaps it’s symbolic.”

“It says here it’s supposed to make the bride and groom thirst for one another forevermore.” 

Cassian turns to look across the cabin at Jyn as she moves about in the aft section, bending and stretching as she checks on the stowed shipment.  As if cued by his silence, Jyn glances round and meets his gaze. 

Her eyes go dream-swept for a moment and her lips curve. “That’s hardly a problem we need worry about.” 

Cassian grins appreciatively.  “Also we’re not planning a Perralti ceremony.”  He shakes himself, imagining her skin against his own; goes back to the report he’s been writing for the last half hour.  Scratches his beard and scribes another few lines before glancing up at Bodhi. ”Isn’t it Perralt where the best man and the bride’s attendant also have to marry?”

“No,” Bodhi says “That’s on Hroshor.  And it’s only if the bride and groom both pass away before the wedding.”

“No plans for that,” Jyn says dryly.

“And I have no plans for marrying anyone,” K adds.  “Even if it were legal.  Which it is not.”  He releases the connection catch on the gun he is cleaning and takes the sections apart carefully.

“Ah – ah, but –“ Bodhi scrolls through about ten back screens, searching – “on Eb’Isa it _is_.  Here it is: ‘Eb’Isan droids, and off-world droids resident on Eb’Isa more than eight planetary months, may contract a marriage with other droids or organics, and may also act as proxy spouses in the event of –‘ - oh, this is fascinating!  I wonder why that arose…”  He reads on, silently, absorbed again in the encyclopaedia.

Cassian chuckles.  “Well, there you have it, K.  If you ever lose the heart of your circuits to a shiny astromech, you know where to go.”

“That is unlikely.  Astromechs are very seldom shiny.  And I have never understood why people consider them cute.”

“People like it when someone small and insignificant-looking is feisty and outspoken and brave beyond their size.  It is cute.  Especially if they bleep.  You know, this is why I love Jyn.”

“I’ll make _you_ bleep if you’re not careful,” his fiancée tells him, coming back into the main cabin.  “Come on, Bodhi, surely you’ve read enough wedding customs by now?”

Bodhi shakes his head.  “Barely started, I’m afraid.  It’s a big old galaxy out there.”  He grins up at them.  “There’s got to be a perfect tradition somewhere for the two of you.  Just let me keep researching, something’ll come up.”

Cassian asks “Did you go to any weddings when you were a child?”

She shakes her head.  “I don’t think my parents knew anyone well enough on Coruscant.  And we were on Lah’mu less than a year.  I’m sure there was a certain amount of sleeping around among the partisans but Saw frowned upon anyone forming close attachments.  Said it was a sign of weakness.”

Her face has gone quiet.  He reaches across to her, strokes her arm.  Shifts along on the bench, inviting her to take the empty space beside him.  “If it’s weakness, then we’re weak together.”

Jyn’s smile is small and closed-lipped as she sits down, but her eyes meet his with warmth, and stay.  He falls into their sea-green beauty.  For a moment the only sound is the throb of his pulse; that and the click and tap of K’s durasteel fingers working on the blaster.

“What are Festi weddings like?” Jyn asks.  “I know you’ve never been back.  But that’s where you got the idea of paired rings, isn’t it?”

He knows she wants a quiet wedding; practically the first thing she said when they discussed it was “simple, no fuss”.  He’s thought about this but in the end it had seemed easier to avoid mentioning the other traditions of his home; he simply can’t picture the fireworks and drinking contests being what she has in mind.  And the shouting, and the dancing; and the brilliant colours, all that red and yellow and violet blue.  She’s put him on the spot now, and he tries to prevaricate. “They’re pretty loud and messy, not really what we’d been planning.”  Jyn looks worried for a moment, and he offers the one thing that doesn’t make marrying on Fest sound like mayhem.  “I remember there were always flowers.  But flowers aren’t easy to get hold of, and it’s not important.  All that matters is that we’re together and we’re with our friends.” 

She squeezes his hand. 

K-2 locks the gun barrel back together.  “All done, ready for use!”

**

Standing at the front of the small chamber of ceremonies, waiting and waiting like this, is weirdly terrifying.  He’s been in so many situations where torture or even death were imminent, and it shocks him to realise this feels worse.  It should be the happiest moment of his life but he has never been so nervous. 

At some point K has become as attached to the concept of “wedding traditions” as Bodhi, and is now refusing to allow him to look round at the guests as they come in, in case of incurring something he refers to, with completely deadpan solemnity, as “bad luck”.  Cassian can hear the doors hissing open and shut, the sound of footsteps and murmuring voices.  But with the exception of the two beings in front of him and the droid at his side, he cannot see anyone.

The celebrant and co-celebrant are both, in their different ways, pretty impressive.  Admiral Ackbar has turned out in full ceremonial dress uniform, snow-white and gold, with huge padded sleeves and massive pleated ruffles that mount up his back like fins.  General Draven looks as though he’s been ironed to within an inch of his life; and he’s smiling, which is downright intimidating.

K-2 chatters.  If he didn’t know better he would think his best man was nervous too.  But it’s probably meant to be reassuring. 

Cassian picks at the starched cuff of his jacket.  This is all taking so long…

“Good luck, Cassian,” says K; and reaches out to turn him gently round.

There’s music playing; bright, joyful music with woodwind and brass and a march rhythm.  It helps him to smile as his best man repositions him; as he wonders whether he really would have been incapable of turning unaided (his legs feel strange enough that it’s not impossible); as he sees Jyn approaching, down the centre aisle between the ranks of guests, with Bodhi at her back grinning like a kid.

Like him, she’s wearing uniform.  The formal grey-green jacket and snug pants fit her figure closely.  Like him she has a line of small medals and ribbons on her chest; fewer than his, but just as well-polished.  Like him, she has a smile that is 20% nerves and 80% sudden incredulous happiness.

Unlike him, she’s wearing flowers.

Her dark hair is brushed and parted but where normally it would be bound into a bun with a plain tie, today it hangs over her shoulders and down her back in loose chestnut brown waves.  Wrapped over her head, holding the swept-back locks away from her face, is a broad, piled up band of crimson and gold and violet-blue flowers.

Bodhi is wearing one, too, and carrying what looks like a third.  The brilliant colours of a traditional Festi wedding crown.  As they reach the front of the aisle he passes it to Jyn and she reaches up to place it on Cassian’s head.

Her lip quivers, and he has a struggle not to cry.  He’s biting his own lip as they turn, hand in hand at last, to face the Admiral.

“Friends and comrades, welcome to this happy gathering…”

**

The ceremony itself is short and simple.  Elements of it will stay in Cassian’s memory forever.  Discovering that his flowers must have been kept in water till the very last minute, as a hundred icy-cold drips sink into his hair.  Jyn’s expression when K-2 produces the rings from his thoracic storage slot.  Admiral Ackbar’s improvised flourishes of poetic language, and the astonishing realisation at one moment that Draven is trying not to laugh at a particularly choice phrase.

Signing the register and seeing Jyn sign her name beside his.  She writes “Jyn Andor”, without hesitation.  One would almost think she had been practising.

The realisation, as the wedding party comes into the main canteen to eat afterwards, that the reason rations have seemed unusually dull of late has been because the cooks were preparing baked goods and saving up fresh ingredients for today.

K-2’s speech, spectacular even by his standards.

Chirrut and Baze dancing.  The Twi’leks dancing.  The sword dances, the candle dances…

The extraordinary amounts of alcohol, from high quality wines to the rawest hooch, that people have brought.

Bodhi, drunk.  Luke Skywalker drunk.  Leia Organa Solo, quietly tipsy, admitting it was she who three years ago set up the SkyPilot Kiss Sweepstake that has run so successfully since, and raised so much credit for the Alderaan refugee relief fund.  Her husband laughing so much he falls off his seat.

Chewbacca and the diminutive Takodanan pirate singing duets, very drunk indeed.

The fireworks.

**

In lieu of the honeymoon they won’t be able to begin till it’s operationally feasible, they’ve been assigned an unoccupied suite in Command quarters for their wedding night.  It’s huge, easily four times the size of their room in officers’ quarters.  A bed made up in crisp, ironed sheets and soft quilts, a ‘fresher so big there’d be room to dance in the shower; even a tiny personal kitchen unit.

“Look, Jyn, I can cook for you!”

“Cassian, I’m stuffed.  All that fruit cake.  All that cheese!”

“You didn’t have to eat all the cheese.”

“Oh, I _did_ …”

“Okay, maybe you did.  Mrs Andor.”

Jyn strolls into the refresher and he hears the taps running at the basin.  After a moment she calls “I’m putting my flowers in water – do you want to put yours in, too?”

He follows her and leans on the doorframe, watching.

One of the dahlias in her crown has begun to collapse, and when she lifts it away from her head it leaves a scattering of hot gold petals in her hair.  She settles the crown carefully on the surface of the water, stems immersed and flowers floating.

“Did Bodhi get the flowers right?” she asks.  “He was worried they’d be the wrong kind, or the wrong colours…”

“They’re beautiful.  He found the right colours, just perfect, the traditional ones.  Flowers – flowers were such a huge luxury on Fest, because of the cold.  So we only wore them for really special occasions, to show how highly we honour someone or how much we love them.  I still can’t believe how stunning you looked when I turned round.  It was like a dream.”  He takes off his own crown and examines it thoughtfully. “You’re supposed to press one bloom from each of them in a big book and keep them forever.  But we don’t have any paper books.”

“We could freeze them?” Jyn suggests.  “Or preserve them in liquid nitro?”

“Let’s think about that tomorrow, shall we?”

He lowers the circlet of crimson and gold and blue into the water beside hers.

There’s a mirror above the basin.  Cassian slides his arms round her and pulls her close, her back warm against his chest, and they stand looking at their reflections above the basin full of colour.

“Captain and Mrs Andor,” Jyn says. “Well, well…”

“So, Mrs Andor…” He nuzzles under her ear and kisses her. “Do you want to have a shower – or a bath, look - when did you last see an actual bath tub? – or do you want to consummate our marriage?”

In the glass he sees Jyn’s smile slowly blossom into a wide open grin.  Even now it’s unusual to see her smile so broadly.  “ _Consummate_ ,” she says.  “I like that word.  And after all, it _is_ our wedding night.”

**

After years when being together meant the rare  bits of time they could snatch between missions, days numbered as soon as they began, exhausted nights sleeping curled against one another, it still seems strange to have leisure.  The bed looks unnervingly luxurious, and the cleanliness and spaciousness and excess of comfort all make Cassian feel oddly nervous. 

He toes off his shoes carelessly and pushes them under the console shelf.  Fiddles with his collar, unused to this formal wear with all the extra buttons.  Hears Jyn mutter a swear word, and looks up to find she too is struggling with fastenings, with her head down and slightly turned away.  This is supposed to be the most romantic moment of their lives, and here they both are, awkwardly undressing, shy of one another and of the solemnity of the night.

But this is Jyn, who he trusts more than any living being in the universe.  The heart of his heart.

He moves to her side of the bed quickly.  She’s got the jacket off now and is folding it neatly, glancing round for somewhere to put it.  The tension that has made him discard his shoes has got her suddenly tidy and anxious.  She looks up startled into his face as he joins her, and he takes the jacket and tosses it on the console; raises his hands to help her with the shirt.  It strikes him as ridiculous that it should be easier to undo someone else’s clothing than one’s own. 

His hands move quickly and neatly down, slipping each button free.  As he reaches her waist she lays her own hands over his, stilling him.  He looks up, meets her eyes.

There’s heat in their sea-coloured depths that catches a fire in him, now as always.  Now and forever, he thinks, and is glad. 

They are standing very close now, almost breathing one another’s breath.  He thinks of their first time, both of them still stiff and bruised from Scarif, scars barely scabbed, hair smelling of bacta in the humid air; of the mingled perspiration, the clumsy, desperate need, overwhelming, insatiable, fulfilled at last.  Thinks of nights on the ice, clinging, trying to conserve every scrap of body heat.  He pushes the fabric of her dress uniform shirt slowly off her shoulders, first one side and then the other; slides it down her arms, those deceptively slender arms, hard with muscle.  The shirt falls behind her as she pulls its tails out of her waistband and lets it drop to the floor.  Very gently she raises one arm to embrace his neck while the other steals round his back.

She’s still gazing into his face.  He’s still burning and drowning in her eyes, he sees how her gaze flicks across his features, taking him in as she’s done so many times.  If he were bloody or beaten now, she would be noting each wound.  He remembers standing like this, light passing in broad bands, the vibration of the elevator almost too much for him to stay standing; seeing her take in how broken he was, how he shook with pain and exhaustion.  Seeing her joy break and fall in the face of his injuries, her eyes filling with loss anticipated, with the knowledge they were descending not to hope but to death, his death and very probably hers.   

The memory must be in his eyes now; Jyn moves her hand to his cheek, stroking him, her thumb brushing across his lips.  A faint crease of concern comes and goes between her brows.

He pulls her to him, as he had wanted to do that day when he’d lacked the strength to make another move unaided.  All her warmth presses against him and she raises her mouth to his.  The intensity of desire and the intensity of memory twine together through every feeling, every thought; what they have been and what they are now, inseparable.  He would not change it, because all that pain led to this now.  Will there ever be a day when Jyn’s mouth on his does not feel sacred?  He is a man born on the grey ice, and he holds fire in his arms and is bathed in it, and knows it is his life.

These lips parting on his, tender, inviting; lips he has seen split and bruised, bloodied, clenched in pain.  These hands caressing him, that he has seen gone limp in unconsciousness, or shaking, strapped in reddened bandages, cradled against her panting breast.

All of his longing still unassuaged, trembling, welcoming and begging, just as hers does.  Life, not death; hope, and the certainty of something more than a dead ending.  One another.

Hands touch, and every grazing contact is like the kiss of sunlight.  Jyn’s mouth on his is hot and wet, her tongue teasing his; he presses back joyfully and suddenly she begins to giggle.

“What?”  He breaks off from her lips, breathless, aching, alive.  Begins to grin stupidly at the sight in his arms; Jyn the taciturn shield-maiden who allowed no-one to approach her; Jyn laughing, half-naked, with flower petals in her hair.

“I am so happy,” she says.  Sparkling-eyed; then her smile clamps shut in disbelief for a moment at the sound of the words.  It wavers back and returns with a little doubting gasp.  “So _happy_ – I don’t know how to _be_ so happy…”

Cassian takes her face between his hands, presses his own smile to hers.  “ _Querida_ …”

“ _Te quiero_ ,” Jyn says when their lips part again; speaking very precisely and carefully, as though it is she teaching him the words.

“ _Te quiero, te amo_ ,” he murmurs back.  He kisses down her neck into the hollow of her collar bone.  “ _Mi amor_ …”

“ _Mi amor_ …” Her hands are in his hair, fingertips stroking, smoothing then ruffling it again, probing in to draw the shape of his skull.  “Oh, my love.”

“My love…”  Cassian slips the straps of her bra off her shoulders and pushes the soft cups down with his mouth, trailing kisses onto one breast.  A bubble of triumphant amusement escapes him as he manages to undo the back clasp one-handed. “Ah, got it first time!”

“ _Mi amor_ – how do you say ‘hurry up and finish undressing me’ in Festi?”

She has that challenge look on her face that he’s seen countless times and loves more than he knows how to say; as though she’ll fight him even in play, and trusts him never to retaliate except in the same way.  The last ghosts of past pain vanish as he starts to chuckle.   “What about me?  When do ** _I_** start to get undressed?”

For answer Jyn reaches out and carefully unfastens one jacket button for him.  “Kiss me.”

He kisses her upper lip.

She shrugs off the bra and lets it fall.

“Again?” he asks.

“Yes please, Cassian.  _Husband_.”

Another kiss, to the corner of her smiling mouth.  Another button.  Then she slides her hands inside the half-opened jacket and tugs the shirt out of his pants; works her hands inside it, strokes up his spine till she’s clasping the wings of his shoulder blades. 

The next kiss is long and hot again, till they are both breathless.

“You want to get another button for me?” Cassian pants.  “Or shall I just rip everything off now?”

She laughs, as out of breath as he, and begins systematically unfastening his jacket and then his shirt.  He throws both garments off and catches hold of her hands; draws them to his lips, kisses each fingertip in turn.  Then bends and scoops her up, and carries her to the bed, and the next embrace.

**

He wakes with the taste of salt on his lips, and Jyn’s body warm against his side.  The lamps are still burning, and he’s fallen asleep with his head pillowed on her bosom, her left hand resting in his hair.  His mouth is mere inches from a long scar, one that puckers down from the collar bone almost to her nipple. 

He remembers the day she took that blow.  So many times he has almost lost her.  So many scars like this, left behind.

Cassian raises his head, props himself on his elbows, and looks at his wife.

Her hair is down, tangled around her on the pillow, and her face is soft in sleep, all the lines and shadows eased, at rest.  She almost looks just her age; a bare twenty-six, still not much more than a girl in some societies, and no older than he was when they first knew one another.  But the shuttered, broken fury he met on Yavin 4 has gone; has changed, has flowered and grown strong.  And his own shut, broken life has opened and grown with hers.  He never thought to see his thirtieth year.  Never thought to see the peace.

Scarred, sleeping Jyn beside him, the catalyst that changed the course of the war, and saved countless billions of lives, his own among them. 

They’ll build some kind of a future together; make some kind of home, find some kind of new roles, now the Alliance is beginning to wind down intelligence operations at last.  They’ll raise a child together, and face that and all the other challenges of this new life, together.

He kisses the length of the nearest scar, from the shoulder down to her breast.  Lingers for a moment at the lower end, feeling Jyn stir in her sleep and shift her weight beneath him.  The hand that had slipped from his hair comes back, feeling for him, finding him.  He moves his lips slowly down, onto the nipple, and kisses and nibbles at her there; hears her voice give a happy mumble, still half asleep, feels a breath of laughter moving through her body. 

“Good morning,” she murmurs.

“Good morning,” Cassian says, and goes on kissing.

He moves to the old burn at the side of her ribs; then to the knife scar just below her sternum.  Corellia, Lothal.  The knife wound had been small, but deep, she’d bled quietly for hours while outside the viewports the frenzied blue of hyperspace blurred time, and Cassian swore and sweated in fear and tried to gun some tiny further margin of speed from the engines.

The next scar is the neat one on the right side of her abdomen; the mission to infiltrate a medical facility on Ennoch 3, where their cover was inadvertently improved instead of blown, by Jyn’s appendicitis.

There’s a circular pucker next to her hip bone, a direct hit from a projectile gun on Naator; and below that another long one, jagged and irregular as an earthquake fracture, scissoring round her left thigh; shrapnel that tore through her quadriceps, one of the few times he’s ever heard her scream aloud in pain.  That was another bleeder, another close call.  He kisses the scar slowly and tenderly; every inch of healed skin holding the life in, the death out. 

Jyn’s hand strokes his hair sleepily.  “Do I get to kiss all your scars next?” she asks.

“If you want to.”

“I’d like that.  There are a lot of them…”

“This is true…”

Reaching the inner edge of the shrapnel scar he nuzzles in; spreads her thighs slowly, works his way in between her legs.  Tender rose-red flesh throbs under his tongue and Jyn groans softly.

That bittersweet taste, the musk of her body, with its edge of salt seas and sweetness; her movements under him suddenly going weak and soft; it’s the fire he’s never extinguished, the turn-on he’s never come close to exhausting, feeling her trust in every helpless sound she makes, every unresisting muscle.  He pulses his tongue against her, quick and hard, licking and sucking while she shivers, shudders, moans, gasps his name. When she comes he slides a finger inside her and presses home while her walls flutter and clench in a wild grip.  He’ll never be able to get enough of this; it’s still as much a shock and a delight today as it first was five years ago, to hear and feel her coming apart, allowing herself to let go, for him.

As the pulse of her orgasm begins to slow he works his way back up her body, and she touches him, and guides him in, slowly, till he is sheathed in her wet, close heat, hanging breathless above her.   Her eyes open, the fire of oceans, melting, dissolving, and there’s no defence between them, nothing but skin on skin, heart on heart.  The weakening throbbing inside her as she comes down is almost unbearably arousing and he pushes deep and draws back, moaning into her neck “Jyn, Jyn…” unsure how long he can hold on.  Wanting never to come, and to keep coming forever, never to lose this perfect tenderness, this vulnerability; his strength safe inside hers, this miracle…

Jyn clutches onto him, quickening again, muscles pulsating and tightening.  Her hands grip his back convulsively and her voice in his ear is small and fearless and ecstatic: “I love you, I love you…”  Cassian whimpers and comes, losing everything in her embrace, the world going dark; nothing left but her arms wrapped round him, her body holding him, her heartbeat drumming against his skin.  “Yes, yes, yes…”

They sleep again, tangled together, limb upon limb and breast against breast.  This night and all the many nights to come.

 


End file.
